This article proposes a continuum of ‘Visitors’ and ‘Residents’ as a replacement for Prensky’s much&dash;criticised Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Challenging the basic premises upon which Prensky constructed his typology, Visitors and Residents fulfil a similar purpose in mapping individuals’ engagement with the Web. We argue that the metaphors of ‘place’ and ‘tool’ most appropriately represent the use of technology in contemporary society, especially given the advent of social media. The Visitors and Residents continuum accounts for people behaving in different ways when using technology, depending on their motivation and context, without categorising them according to age or background. A wider and more accurate representation of online behaviour is therefore established.

‘The digital natives/digital immigrants distinction is dead or at least dying’. So proclaims Doug Holton in his blogpost. He continues: ‘Unfortunately, the idea is still uncritically accepted even in some journal articles, and perhaps used as an excuse or crutch too often for poor or ineffective teaching practices’. Holton is not alone in his criticism. McKenzie (2007) writes strongly against Prensky’s (2001a, b) typology identifying a number of ‘thinly supported claims’, while Kennedy, et al. (2010) demonstrate through an empirical research project that Prensky’s age–related hypothesis is very much less clear–cut than the Natives and Immigrants dichotomy implies.

Our intention in this article is to propose an alternative, which we have termed ‘Visitors and Residents’.

Prensky’s distinction between people who are entirely at ease within a digital environment and those who manage to learn to exist but who (in his view) will never be fully competent, has gained enormous currency and, until recently, widespread acceptance. Similarly, his linked assertion that the differentiation also signals the need for an educational revolution, requiring a new approach which accommodates the up–and–coming Natives, has not only been largely believed but has provoked a sense of panic among ‘Immigrant educators’ who now perceive themselves wrong–footed and unable to step up to the plate.

Prensky himself has expressed doubts over the validity of his thinking (Prensky, 2009). Nor is he the first to try and analyse perceived behaviours of learners by categorising them into types. The benefits of so doing, as well as the disadvantages, are well recognised: benefits are that these categories allow others to use this new knowledge to augment the learning experience; disadvantages focus principally on the inflexibility of types, as well as the tendency to box individuals into one type or another, overlooking contradictory evidence. Theories of learning styles favour typologies of this sort, as do certain theories of human development, and many struggle to allow individuals the space simultaneously to exhibit traits characteristic of different types.

Why, then, would we want to propose an alternative to Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants? Firstly, we recognise the usefulness of these typologies, despite their drawbacks. Secondly, we feel that although many criticisms of Prensky are valid, he initiated an important dialogue and offered a framework which those concerned with the quality and effectiveness of education delivered electronically could use. He was one of the first to do this in a fast–moving domain and this contribution should be acknowledged. His Natives and Immigrants were hypothetical children of their time, however, and we believe that as our understanding has developed, it is appropriate to re–evaluate what was previously accepted and to change it to suit the purposes of today. Not only so, but there are many instances — to the point, perhaps, of being a general and widespread habit — where Prensky’s ideas on Natives and Immigrants have been inappropriately transported into a social media context, paradoxically finding themselves as ‘immigrants’ in a new land.

We introduce our discussion in section II by critiquing Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants with a specific focus on the nature of the metaphor. The section also suggests that in the ten years since Prensky published his Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), technology, computer applications, and hence the way in which education takes place, have moved on to the point that the Native/Immigrant dichotomy is now redundant. In section III we explore new metaphors of tool, place and space, and, in section IV, therefore, we present our alternative which builds on yet replaces one of the underdeveloped strengths in Prensky’s typology using in particular, the metaphor of place. We make the assumption of familiarity with Prenky’s work and for that reason do not summarise it here [1].

II. Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: A critique

II.1. Metaphors: Language and age

Key to Prensky’s typology is the connection he made between computing competence and age. In his original paper, he writes:

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N–[for Net]–gen or D–[for digital]–gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn — like all immigrants, some better than others — to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain. [2]

Prensky’s language–based analogy is compelling and it is easy to see why it quickly commanded attention. Recently, however, challenges have been mounted that separate the two dimensions and call into question, in particular, whether it is genuinely the case firstly that older learners are really as handicapped as Prensky suggests, and secondly that younger learners are as privileged as he understands them to be. Ten years on, evidence and logic challenge both positions, with, for example, comments such as the following from Bennett, et al. (2008):

Though limited in scope and focus, the research evidence to date indicates that a proportion of young people are highly adept with technology and rely on it for a range of information gathering and communication activities. However, there also appears to be a significant proportion of young people who do not have the levels of access or technology skills predicted by proponents of the digital native idea. Such generalisations about a whole generation of young people thereby focus attention on technically adept students. With this comes the danger that those less interested and less able will be neglected, and that the potential impact of socio–economic and cultural factors will be overlooked. It may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations.[3]

Similarly, Margaryan and Littlejohn write:

Many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially networked technologically–fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning. While the use of technologies is limited in terms of the range and the nature, there is some evidence that younger students use some tools more actively than the older students, but neither of these two groups uses these technologies to support their learning effectively. Educators therefore cannot presume that all young students are “digital natives” who understand how to use technology to support and enhance their learning. [4]

It is increasingly clear that, just as is the case for almost every subject discipline and expertise, some learners will acquire the requisite skills quickly, while others will struggle, regardless of age. It is also significant that formal bodies which regularly survey Internet use, such as Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS), do not use specifically age–related categories for their data collection, but rather life–stage categories. The majority of OxIS 2009 surveys on The Internet in Britain focus on students, employed and retired people, making no inferences about any commensurate age–related dimensions. The implication is that each category is equally technologically competent, but their respective life–stage leads them to different types of use.

For the purposes of this paper our goal is not to disprove Prensky’s thesis per se, but instead to challenge the underlying metaphor of language– and second–language–learning which he builds his case on, and then to offer an alternative. We want to ask questions such as: Can learning technological skills be likened to that of language learning? Is the analogy appropriate? If not, can another more appropriate metaphor be identified? It is undoubtedly significant that there has been a move towards speaking of digital literacies (rather than, for example, digital languages) in recent years. Lankshear and Knobel (2008) draw attention to the move from the singular ‘literacy’ to the plural ‘literacies’, a move of which they approve on account of, amongst other things, &rlsquo;the sheer diversity of specific accounts of “digital literacy” that exist, and consequent implications of that for digital literacy policies’ [5]. They also provide a useful summary of the ways in which ‘digital literacy’ has been interpreted and used. These include:

This sheer variety means that digital literacy can be seen as “a framework for integrating various other literacies and skill–sets” without “the need to encompass them all” or to serve as “one literacy to rule them all” (Martin cited in Bawden, Chapter 1 here; Martin, 2006). Equally, however, it reminds us that any attempt to constitute an umbrella definition or overarching frame of digital literacy will necessarily involve reconciling the claims of myriad concepts of digital literacy, a veritable legion of digital literacies.

There are undoubtedly similarities between mastering this range of literacies and learning a second language, although research about precisely how people learn a new language in adulthood constitutes a complete field in its own right and cannot be explored here. Yet this still seems not to be Prensky’s principal focus. Instead, he targets the foreign accent which remains and which will always be the giveaway of someone’s background and origins. For him, the accent is a matter of habit or of first course of action. So, as the above quote demonstrates, the instinct not to go to the Internet (presumably in favour of using a paper–based encyclopedia) when searching for information, or the tendency to read an instruction manual (also paper–based) rather than work out how something functions by trial and error, are both recognisable ‘accents’.

Once again, it is easy to challenge these assertions. Now that the Internet has been in widespread use in educational establishments for around 15 years, it has clearly become the source of information chosen first by seekers, regardless of age [7]. In many cases the Internet is now the sole up-to-date source of information, and certainly the sole source which offers much free–of–charge. Secondly, reading an instruction manual for other tasks (assembling flat–packed furniture, using a new piece of machinery for the first time, getting to know a new smart phone, etc.) is often a last resort once again for people of all ages.

In this paper we demonstrate that that Prensky was: a) over hasty in appropriating an analogy which cannot bear the weight required of it; and, b) imprecise in his combination of diverse elements (second–language learning, accent, habit and age, linking all these to brain development) which cannot be legitimately combined to make his case. We seek to propose an alternative, highlighting how the advent of social media has dramatically changed the terrain of computer–mediated education, which in turn has enabled us to place a different metaphor, that of ‘place’, at centre stage and offer the analogy of Visitors and Residents as alternatives to Digital Natives and Immigrants.

III. Towards a new metaphor of engagement with online technology

Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants pre–date the launching of what are now commonly known as social media applications. The social bookmarking site Delicious, for example, was launched in 2003 as was MySpace. Both Facebook and World of Warcraft [8] launched in 2004; Bebo and YouTube in 2005; and, Twitter in 2006. Prior to 2003, the Internet was used primarily as a means of finding information with Google leading the way since 1997 in offering an effective means of searching for and gathering information. A key distinction between information–gathering versus social–networking sites is that the latter invite individuals to project their personas online as a ‘digital identity’ via text, image and video. Furthermore, social media platforms facilitate the construction, by the individual, of complex social networks not constrained by physical geography. These are critical shifts in the use of the internet which we suggest are transforming the nature of relationships, citizenship and learning.

In response to these changes the metaphors which we suggest best represent the engagement with online technology now widely experienced are those of ‘tool’ and ‘place/space’. This section looks at both. Certain platforms on the Web fit quite neatly under the metaphor of ‘tool’, while others are more closely aligned to the metaphor of ‘place’. ‘Tool’ is functional and may provide a bridge between Prensky’s understanding of how people used computer technology and that which we propose. ‘Place’, on the other hand, is social. Increasingly, the two overlap.

III.1. The metaphors of tool, place and space

Until recently, with the exception of gaming, computing was almost solely linked to ideas of efficiency and goal–orientated functionality. Only now are we witnessing the social appropriation of new computing technologies. Microsoft’s Office suite is an excellent example of this, as well as of the skills that people needed to use the applications effectively. Each application had — and has — a specific purpose that enabled users to do something. It functioned as a tool, a means to an end; users learned and practised skills, developing varying degrees of competence and confidence in achieving their desired ends. Despite numerous iterations of these platforms and of computing operating systems, a set of generally–accepted principles of good practice emerged relating to what users needed and how they could access this most effectively, with the result that users could develop a set of transferable skills applicable across a range of platforms and become computer literate.

In the abrupt cultural shift towards the construction of social networks, we argue that the analogies of language and age cease to function and believe that a metaphor of place is more fit for the purpose of understanding different behaviours and potentially aptitudes. The use of ‘place’ as a metaphor to conceptualise the ‘virtual’ nature of the Web is not new (see Johnston, 2009; Wenger, et al., 2009). However, our definition of place does not make a hard distinction between the virtual and the physical; on the contrary, we are proposing that place is primarily a sense of being present with others. A sense of social presence (White and Le Cornu, 2010) is something those who spend time on social media platforms experience to a high level, with the effect of foregrounding a broad sense of digital identity. This in turn results in a type of personification within social media spaces as people project aspects of their identity to an imagined audience (see Marwick and boyd, 2010). The social dimension of computing has brought about a paradigm shift in many individuals’ experience of computer use as well as influenced their attitude and motivation towards the use and purpose of connected digital technologies.

The metaphor of ‘place’ is therefore one which lends itself very easily to the experience people have when they are engaged and interacting socially with others via a computer. It is not uncommon to hear people asking each other if they have ‘been’ ‘in’ to Facebook today, for example. One of the key features is the fact that people can still meet in an area common to all of them, and for that reason an impression of location and of social space is created. Just as physical, geographical places have architectural characteristics and town planners can make a real–life city more, or less, user–friendly to navigate, so software designers are responsible for the navigability of platforms, and Facebook users are familiar with the frustration of suddenly ‘losing their way’ when the platform is upgraded and changed. In all of these experiences, the metaphors of space and place are used to describe what is going on.

The distinction between and shift from people’s appropriation of computer programmes as tools to thinking of platforms as social spaces is clearly identifiable in an application such as Google Docs. In its original basic form, Google Docs offers a functional tool whereby users can create documents and make them available to others. While this is happening at an individual level, the application remains a tool. As soon as another person, or people, join in and participate in editing and sharing in the creation of the document, a social place is created. Users can reconsider their actions in a kind of social context, discussing with each other aspects of the document and experiencing a social dimension as well as functional.

We therefore argue that tools, places and spaces are the three key metaphors that most aptly describe the experience of computer users in a world where social media are becoming more and more prevalent. We suggest that Prenksy’s understanding of ‘place’ was limited and tagged to his principal metaphor of language; we are now suggesting that this metaphor should be appropriately contextualised and to occupy centre stage in any discussion about how people interact with each other and with content when both are electronically mediated, and be linked to the metaphor of tool. This then allows the formulation of a new typology, that of Visitors and Residents. These are explored in the next section.

IV. Visitors and Residents

IV.1. Visitors

We propose that Visitors understand the Web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have defined a goal or task and go into the shed to select an appropriate tool which they use to attain their goal. Task over, the tool is returned to the shed. It may not have been perfect for the task, but they are happy to make do so long as some progress is made. This is important, since Visitors need to see some concrete benefit resulting from their use of the platform. Significantly, Visitors are unlikely to have any form of persistent profile online which projects their identity into the digital space. They are anonymous, their activity invisible to all but the databases running the Web sites they use. Individuals who most closely fit the Visitor approach give a number of reasons for not wanting a ‘digital identity’ which would persist in some form even when they were not online. Issues of privacy and fear of identity theft are paramount [9] but there is also a sense that social networking activities are banal and egotistical. Implicit in this is the idea that if you have a ‘real’ social life and network of friends then you wouldn’t choose to socialise online in a visible manner. It is this visibility, or the ‘broadcast’ nature of the visibility, which is key; Visitors are not averse to using e–mail or Skype to maintain relationships but they are wary of creating a Facebook profile.

Visitors then see the Web as primarily a set of tools which deliver or manipulate content (this can include the content of a conversation because, as mentioned, they are happy to accept the Web as a useful conduit for interpersonal communication). This content is often distanced as far as possible from personal opinion (unless a competent authority is in evidence or a pre–existing off–line relationship). In effect, the ‘non–referenced’ or non–expert opinion and notions such as the wisdom of the crowd are avoided. Ultimately to Visitors the Web is simply one of many tools they can use to achieve certain goals; it is categorised alongside the telephone, books, pen and paper and off–line software. It is not a ‘place’ to think or to develop ideas and to put it crudely, and at its most extreme, Visitors do their thinking off–line. So Visitors are users, not members, of the Web and place little value in belonging online.

IV.2. Residents

Residents, on the other hand, see the Web as a place, perhaps like a park or a building in which there are clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can approach and with whom they can share information about their life and work. A proportion of their lives is actually lived out online where the distinction between online and off–line is increasingly blurred. Residents are happy to go online simply to spend time with others and they are likely to consider that they ‘belong’ to a community which is located in the virtual. They have a profile in social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and are comfortable expressing their persona in these online spaces. To Residents, the Web is a place to express opinions, a place in which relationships can be formed and extended. While they use ‘tools’ such as online banking and shopping systems they also use the Web to maintain and develop a digital identity. Since they also undertake many of the activities that Visitors do, their residency is an additional layer of interaction and activity. When Residents log off, an aspect of their persona remains. This could be in many forms ranging from status updates to social networking platforms, to artefacts in media sharing sites or opinions expressed in blog posts or blog comments.

Residents see the Web primarily as a network of individuals or clusters of individuals who in turn generate content. Value online is assessed in terms of relationships as well as knowledge. Residents do not make a clear distinction between concepts of content and of persona. A blog post is as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas. The fact that Wikipedia has been authored collectively is not a concern, what is important is how relevant the information they find is to their particular needs.

V. Discussion

Our Visitors and Residents typology should be understood as a continuum and not a binary opposition. Individuals may be able to place themselves at a particular point along this continuum rather than in one of two boxes. Nor is a predominantly Visitor approach necessarily any less effective or of less value than a predominantly Resident approach since the value of either has to be set against a given context and set of goals. Similarly, we do not consider the Visitor to be necessarily any less technically adept than the Resident. The concept of ‘technical’ aptitude should be viewed as more than simply an ability to manipulate hardware and software. It is more useful to think of the ‘technical’ as extending into skill sets required by a given discipline, such as the ability to research a given topic. This definition of the technical then intersects with the notion of digital literacy which is a more useful framework to assess the value of given approaches, the relative merits of which are discussed in reports such as Beetham, et al.’s (2009) LLiDA project and Gillen and Barton’s (2010) Digital literacies (http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf).

A simple reading of this typology might lead one to believe that the category of Visitor is somehow a subset of that of Resident or that the goal of Visitors should be to extend their skills towards the Resident end of the continuum. Stoerger (2009) introduces this idea in her ‘digital melting pot’ analogy by suggesting that Web users with a range of competencies can simply learn from each other by mingling in shared spaces on the Web. This does not take into account the motivation behind a type of engagement with the Web, however, and assumes, again, that technical aptitude is directly linked to being ‘successful’ in the online environment. Nevertheless, it is often much more efficient to research a particular topic in such a way that meets the needs of traditional educational requirements (essays, exams) if a Visitor approach is taken. Visitors’ technical and intellectual skills in the pursuit of specific content may well be significantly more sophisticated than Residents’, regardless of their age (and here we specifically challenge Prensky’s belief that older people will never achieve as high a degree of technical aptitude as younger people). Similarly it has been suggested that aptitude in social media platforms often does not translate into other online spaces or tools (Stoerger, 2009), although this is difficult to quantify. Residents’ ability to engage with ‘new’ platforms in ways in which appear culturally novel or radical does not equip them to negotiate Wikipedia or an online library catalogue successfully either in terms of functionality or the literacy skills required. The literacy required is not simply one of off–line/online or gamer/non–gamer; online literacies differ between platforms, although to an outsider the skills required may seem equivalent and there is a certain commonality in the acquisition of transferable skills. However, the notion of social networking platforms masks the fact that for many ‘expert’ Facebook users Twitter is relatively undecipherable. At one level this can be accounted for by the difference in functionality, but it also relates to the literacies required for the respective platforms, together with the motivation. The two platforms serve quite different purposes.

It would be easy simply to categorise individuals at a particular point along the Visitor/Resident continuum with some indication of their potential direction of travel. This labelling of individuals as a single type or as representing a single form of behaviour is where, as mentioned earlier, the nature of a typology can fall down. As Wenger (1998) has highlighted, we are all members of multiple communities and have to negotiate our roles and identities as we navigate the ‘nexus’ of communities we belong to. In a similar manner an individual’s approach to the Web is likely to change dependent on context. For example, an individual might take a Resident approach in their private life but a Visitor approach in their role as a professional. Similarly it is not unusual for someone in a leadership role in a special interest group to manage that responsibility in a Resident style online while in a personal or professional context they choose to act as a Visitor. Individuals are generally very good at managing their differing approaches across contexts and have much experience of similar shifts in attitude and motivation as they move between roles played out in physical spaces. However, the ubiquity of the Web across these traditional physical boundaries is beginning to pose challenges, blurring the boundaries of traditional contexts, which Marwick and boyd (2010) describe as ‘context collapse’. A good example of this is the Visitor tutor/academic whose rather more Resident personal life is discovered by their students.

There is growing evidence (e.g., boyd, 2008; Helsper and Eynon, 2009; Tenopir and Rowlands, 2007; CiBER, 2007) that while age may be less of a factor in technology use than Prensky envisaged, factors such as conceptions of privacy and the notions of friendship may be shifting generationally. In fact the cultural effects of the social hyperconnectivity brought about by social media and mobile devices are often masked by shallow assessments of technological functionality and the apparent capability of specific groups in consuming ‘new’ technology.

VI. Conclusion

We propose that our Visitors and Residents paradigm not only describes the lived experience and practice of technological engagement in a more accurate way than Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants, but it is based on a more secure foundation. Our typology of Visitors and Residents turn to the metaphor of place to provide an analytic framework, but the strength of moving away from language and accent and placing the emphasis on motivation allows for a wide variety of practices which span all age groups and does not require individuals to be boxed, inexorably, in one category or the other. Both ‘place’ and ‘tool’ have the capacity to incorporate motivation. Questions such as: ‘What am I going there for?’, ‘What am I hoping to achieve?’, ‘Which place best serves my purpose?’, ‘How long do I intend to stay?’, ‘Have I got the skills that I need?’ and ‘Am I happy to be on my own, or would I prefer to be in company?’ all fit within the Visitors and Residents paradigm and transcend issues such as age, technological ‘geekishness’, and the development of the brain, while still recognising that individuals may have a greater or less well developed natural aptitude for using technology and that some may never move (we avoid the term ‘progress’) beyond a low–level engagement of selecting a small range of tools for a limited number of purposes. Another strength of the paradigm is our understanding of it as a continuum along the lines of that depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Clearly, some people may operate entirely as Visitors, visiting specific Web places for specific purposes, entirely on their own and never leaving a footprint behind. At the other extreme, ‘total’ Residents (equally small in number, we suggest) spend all their online time in social interaction, never using the Internet for information–gathering yet leaving behind significant evidence of their presence. More representative of the majority of Internet use is that which takes place within the central box. Individuals move around the box, sometimes functioning more as Visitors, sometimes more as Residents, according to their motivation.

Prensky made a deliberate connection between his Natives and Immigrants and people’s learning styles, preferences, and ultimately, abilities. Our Visitors and Residents paradigm also has educational implications that we have been unable to explore in this paper, but which we do in a following paper. In this, we shall look at understanding and setting expectations, practical aspects to bear in mind when engaging students online (especially when dealing with a large cohort, which is often the case), and explore some of the ways in which Visitors and Residents interacts with current understandings of and calls for digital literacy.

About the authors

David S. White is the co–manager of Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), an elearning research and development group based at the University of Oxford. His research interests include understanding how new technologies function and impact higher education.
E–mail: david [dot] white [at] conted [dot] ox [dot] ac [dot] uk

Alison Le Cornu is a freelance educational consultant working in the HE sector throughout the U.K. She specialises in the study and practice of student–centred learning in as many forms as she can identify.
E–mail: alison [at] alisonlecornu [dot] co [dot] uk

8. World of Warcraft is generally considered a massively multiplayer online game rather than a social media platform, although the boundaries are increasingly blurred (see later). Its significance here is that it heralded a moving away from the individualistic game playing Prensky was focusing on to something much more community–based.

Julia Gillen and David Barton, 2010. “Digital literacies: A research briefing by the technology enhanced learning phase of the teaching and learning research programme,” London: London Knowledge Lab, at http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf, accessed 18 August 2011.